I love smart kids in my class.

It is so nice to have smart kids in a class. Today I was going to have my Programming I kids start on the actual programming of the Visual Basic house. To do this they have to reference the Small Basic library. In order reference the library they need to browse the C drive. Kids do not have rights to access the C drive. “Houston, we have a problem.” So I am trying to remember how this worked last year and it comes to me, I was in my office lab where the computers are in a different OU and the kids can access the C drive. Now what do I do? I really do not want to change the permissions on these computers because they are not well supervised. I am sitting there meditating on the subject when one of the kids walks up and says he has it working. The other day I had given the kids a generic admin account password so they could download VB. I had not changed the password yet. The kid logs in as an admin, creates a project, references the Small Basic library, saves the project on his thumb drive, logs back in as a student, moves the project to his network drive, reopens the project and “poof”, turtle commands from the library work. With my pretty non-existent formal background in VB I had not considered the referenced library has to be included in the project folder. Little details like this are something a teacher could use. I need to add this tidbit to the Programming Methods Course I am assembling. (Everybody should have a fruitless hobby.) This does point out one of the problems with learning to program from a book and the internet. Most programming texts focus on the writing of code, not the management of the IDE or files created when saving projects.

This problem would seem to be somewhat unique to schools. I do not think that having the C drive blocked is a typical scenario for most programmers. It is things like this that can make teaching programming in the high school environment a bit interesting.